The Vanishing Knight of Virtue: On Žižek’s Reading of Hegelian Moral Consciousness

“The universal itself is precisely as idiotic as its concrete and individual appearance.”

Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy

In Absolute Recoil, Slavoj Žižek offers a Lacanian reading of two Hegelian figures of moral consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the “Beautiful Soul” and the “Law of the Heart,” criticizing Lacan’s condensation of these two figures into one. Žižek stresses the importance of keeping their distinction, describing these figures within Lacan’s own framework: the Beautiful Soul as a figure of moral withdrawal and narcissistic pleasure whose refusal to act paradoxically sustains the symbolic order it criticizes (hysteric’s attitude) and the Law of the Heart as the self-proclaimed savior who seeks to impose its own will on society (psychotic’s attitude).¹

Žižek’s analysis appears to overlook an important transitional figure of moral consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology, the “Knight of Virtue,” which is a necessary dialectical stage and can complicate Žižek’s binary framework and his opposition between the hysteric and the psychotic by introducing a third position that acts within the Symbolic but fails through over-identification with abstract virtue. Reintroducing the Knight restores a dialectical mediation and perhaps also invites a reconsideration of Lacan’s so-called “mistake” as a deeper intuition, a recognition of the structural entanglement between the figures Žižek distinguishes.

The Knight of Virtue, emerging between the Law of the Heart and the Beautiful Soul, reveals the internal progression from subjective moral conviction to protest to symbolic failure. Unlike the Law of the Heart, which hallucinates universality, or the Beautiful Soul, which retreats from action, the Knight acts. But this action is futile, rigid, and performative, ultimately reinforcing the very order it seeks to oppose. It marks the dialectic’s comedic moment: the hysteric’s empty gesture, blind to its own complicity in sustaining the structure it criticizes.

Žižek’s bypassing of this figure collapses Hegel’s rich trajectory into a binary of delusion (the Law of the Heart) and withdrawal (the Beautiful Soul), flattening the tragicomic complexity of the moral subject’s entanglement with the Symbolic.

The Law of the Heart: Subjective Universality and the Collapse of Mediation

The Law of the Heart appears in the “Reason” chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology, where consciousness tries to reconcile individuality with universality. After the alienation of the Unhappy Consciousness, Reason affirms that reality is accessible to self-consciousness and not external/unknowable. It starts by observing the world scientifically, studying nature, psychology, and itself, to uncover rational laws beneath appearances. This project fails, collapsing into reductive absurdities like physiognomy and phrenology, mistaking outer form for inner essence. Then comes a shift to practical reason, in which consciousness attempts to actualize freedom in the social world. Figures like Don Juan and Faust, who pursue fulfillment through seduction or knowledge, also fail, revealing that individual desire cannot shape the world. From these failures emerges a new figure: the “Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit,” the next shape of consciousness beyond pleasure & necessity.

In the Law of the Heart, the subject no longer pursues fulfillment in personal desire or pleasure but rather identifies an inner moral law within itself. The inner law is experienced as universal and necessary even though it is subjective. This subject believes that its inner feeling (“heart”) expresses not only a personal truth but the truth of all humanity. It speaks as if in the name of everyone, attempting to lead others to righteousness by imposing its own moral vision onto the world.

But of course, the world does not recognize this subject’s law as universal, and this leads to a clash between subjective conviction and objective reality. As competing “laws of the heart” collide, the subject experiences the world as corrupt, unjust, or deceived. There must be moral blindness, systemic corruption, or conspiracy. Then comes a spiral of rage, self-righteousness, and isolation. The subject hardens into a delirious self-certainty that demands others become like itself, and lives in paranoia and resentment. It mistakes subjective conviction for objective truth and fails to grasp the intersubjective and historical mediation of ethical life.

Žižek, following the Lacanian formulation, associates the figure of the Law of the Heart with the “psychotic attitude—that of a self-proclaimed Savior who imagines his inner Law to be the Law for everybody and is therefore compelled, in order to explain why the ‘world’ does not follow his precepts, to resort to paranoid constructions, to the plotting of dark forces.”²

But perhaps, the Law of the Heart can rather be seen as structurally unstable. It does not yet display the full features of either psychosis or hysteria, as it immediately begins to break down under the weight of its own delusion. By identifying its personal feeling with universal Reason, it stages a moment of immediate fusion between the inner and the outer. It appears as a border phenomenon in which an assumed/fantasized unity obfuscates a sharp contradiction.

Unlike a psychotic position grounded in paranoid self-legislation, the Law of the Heart can be understood more cautiously as a moment of collapsing immediacy in which inner conviction and universality are prematurely merged; a transitional collapse of mediation where subjective conviction is mistaken for universality. Perhaps what is desired is consistency in immediacy, but this subject’s ultimate experience essentially explodes into an unsettling inversion.

In fact, what Hegel shows in the Law of the Heart can be seen as a fundamental inversion: the subject believes it is expressing a purely personal moral belief, but the very act of speaking it transforms it into an impersonal demand, indistinguishable from the universality of the “way of the world” (the “fancied universal”)³. What appears as inner authenticity turns into external necessity, revealing the Law of the Heart as already caught within the structure it claims to oppose. Hegel writes: “The heart-throb for the welfare of mankind therefore passes over into the bluster of a mad self-conceit. It passes over into the rage of a consciousness which preserves itself from destruction by casting out of itself the very topsy-turvy inversion which is itself and which makes every effort to regard and to express that inversion as something other than itself.”⁴

This topsy-turvy experience is indeed tragic. In asserting its singular moral truth, the Law of the Heart inevitably converts it into a universal demand, loses its individuality, and becomes part of the world it condemns. This inversion marks its collapse: what appears as immediate unity between inner law and the world reveals itself as a confused/failed identification of individuality with universality.

So, while Žižek in his reading emphasizes psychosis (foreclosure, paranoia), the focus can perhaps be shifted to collapse through immediacy (failed mediation). Hegel’s emphasis on inversion, the transformation of conviction into universality, and the absorption of subjective law into “the way of the world” allows us to read the Law of the Heart not simply as a hysteric or psychotic, but as a threshold figure whose failure prepares the Knight of Virtue, who vanishes in Žižek’s analysis.

The project/failure of the Law of the Heart doesn’t directly lead to retreat or withdrawal (i.e., Beautiful Soul) but continues through virtue and action. The ambiguous position of the Law of the Heart makes visible the dialectical necessity of the Knight as a missing mediating moment in this journey.

The Knight of Virtue: The “Professional Protester”

As noted above, Žižek criticizes Lacan for making a “deeply significant mistake” by condensing the Law of the Heart and the Beautiful Soul. Lacan speaks of “the Beautiful Soul who, in the name of its Law of the Heart, rebels against the injustices of the world,”⁵ thereby conflating positions that Žižek insists must be kept apart. For Žižek, the Beautiful Soul “designates the hysterical attitude of deploring the wicked ways of the world while actively participating in their reproduction,” whereas the Law of the Heart “clearly refers to a psychotic attitude” imposing its will on all of humanity.⁶

Žižek finds “Lacan’s slip all the more mysterious,” since these figures map cleanly onto Lacanian structures: the hysterical Beautiful Soul situates itself within the big Other and addresses it with a demand within an intersubjective field, while the psychotic Law of the Heart suspends or rejects what Hegel calls “spiritual substance.”⁷ So, the Law of the Heart, as a psychotic figure, hallucinates his inner law as universal, resorting to paranoia when the world resists; and the Beautiful Soul is its hysterical counterpart, retreating from action into self-righteous moral purity. Importantly, Žižek, even though he criticizes Lacan for confusing these two figures, partially defends the slip, as both figures express moral self-certainty that society registers as failure or crime.⁸ Still, he moves too quickly from delusional action to melancholic withdrawal.

To briefly return to the Law of the Heart, Hegel explains that even if the Law of the Heart becomes institutionalized, it loses its subjective authenticity and becomes estranged from the self. What was once a personal conviction now stands above it as an impersonal universal, causing deep disillusionment. The universalization removes the law’s personal meaning which was its origin. As soon as it becomes outwardly expressed, inner truth ceases to be personal. In response to this failure, the individual turns to virtue, which is not merely a moral feeling but also a commitment to redeem the world through action: a revolutionary passion that culminates in the figure of the Knight of Virtue.

Unlike earlier figures of pleasure & necessity, such as Don Giovanni or Faust, the Knight of Virtue believes in sacrificing individuality for the sake of a universal good. The Knight strives to restore humanity’s true essence and has a higher mission to redeem the corrupt world through action. However, the Knight assumes that the good exists independently and needs to be actualized through virtuous deeds. Hegel writes that the Knight’s activity and struggle become mere bluff,

something which he cannot take seriously because he holds that his real strength consists in the good’s existing in and for itself, i.e., to lie in the good accomplishing itself – it is a bluff which he dare not even allow to become serious. This is so because what he turns against the enemy and which he then both finds turned against himself and which he dares to put at risk of deterioration and damage in himself as well as in the enemy, is not supposed to be the good itself.⁹

 

The actions of this heroic figure remain abstract and futile. It throws words and virtue into a cruel/wicked world that does not respond. The moral ideal guiding the Knight is ultimately empty, detached from the messy, chaotic fabric of social life. Its struggle becomes a kind of shadowboxing, a performance of heroism that fails to engage with reality. While the “way of the world” is flexible, cunning, and adaptable, the Knight is rigid. It ultimately becomes comic, like a Don Quixote of morality, swinging at windmills in pursuit of a truth that perpetually remains unactualized. It is caught in empty formality. As Donald Verene says, the Knight of Virtue is “a professional protester” who can “simply change causes at will,” for whom “the fight is the thing.”¹⁰

Unlike the Law of the Heart, the Knight acts within the Symbolic, seeking to redeem the corrupted world through virtuous deeds. Unlike the Beautiful Soul, it does not withdraw, but intervenes, only to find its moral project futile. The Knight’s protest is a performance/spectacle of virtue and over-identification. Its failure as the acting moral subject exposes the limits of virtuous intervention and constitutes a necessary dialectical stage.

In Lacanian terms, the Knight does not exhibit a psychotic structure: it neither forecloses the Symbolic nor constructs a delusional universe. Instead, it remains embedded in the Symbolic, aiming to correct it. Thus, the Knight is closer to the hysteric’s position, but it does not embrace the Beautiful Soul’s passive withdrawal. Its position is a shift from demanding answers from the big Other to attempting to transform it.

The Knight is thus a hysteric in action, whose failure reveals the structural limits of the hysteric’s truth. It can name the fault in the Other and fight against it, but it cannot fix it; it only ends up reinforcing it. Its intervention inevitably collapses into complicity. In other words, it cannot ignore the mutual implication of self and Other (enemy) in the very game of truth it seeks to transform. Hegel writes:

Virtue is not merely like the combatant whose sole concern in the fight is to keep his sword shiny; rather, it was in order to preserve its weapons that virtue started the fight. Not merely can it not use its own weapons, it also must preserve intact those of its enemy and protect them against virtue itself, for they are all noble parts of the good on behalf of which it went into the fight in the first place.¹¹

This is an important moment in the dialectic of moral subjectivity, dramatizing the tragicomic limits of the hysteric’s truth in action.

As explained above, Žižek identifies the Law of the Heart as a psychotic structure. But this reading can overlook the figure’s internal instability/transitional nature. Rather than a full psychotic foreclosure, the Law of the Heart mistakes immediacy for universality, projecting subjective conviction as objective necessity without mediation. It is not yet hysteria, which questions endlessly the Symbolic, nor pure psychosis, but a threshold moment where the fusion of inner & outer collapses under contradiction. This is a delusional immediacy that cannot hold.

Hegel does not conclude with the Law of the Heart’s paranoid delusion or jump ahead to the moral withdrawal of the Beautiful Soul. From this structural collapse, a further development arises in the guise of the Knight. The Knight of Virtue is a necessary dialectical mediation that continues the Law of the Heart’s project but moves it into the domain of action. However, this action remains abstract, disconnected from the historical and ethical substance it would need to transform reality. Its moral protest sustains the very order it seeks to challenge. Thus, without the Knight of Virtue, Žižek’s reading bypasses the dialectical passage from delusion to withdrawal, missing the tragicomic structure of moral failure and the collapse of virtuous action (before the emergence of Sittlichkeit).

The Beautiful Soul: Inward Purity and Moral Inaction

Through the figures of the Law of the Heart and the Knight of Virtue, Hegel makes the transition from “Reason” to “Spirit,” where the reconciliation between individuality and universality becomes something possible through the foundation of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), a shared cultural and institutional life where freedom is actualized collectively.

In the “Spirit Certain of Itself: Morality” section of the Phenomenology, Hegel traces the rise and fall of the moral worldview. Following the failures of ethical life, the Enlightenment, and the Reign of Terror, self-consciousness turns inward, grounding duty in internal conviction rather than external authority. Morality now rests on self-imposed duty: the subject sees itself as autonomous, believing that recognizing duty suffices for moral action. To sustain this, it posits a higher reality where morality aligns with happiness, nature, or divine justice. But these assumptions compromise its autonomy, exposing it to external guarantees. What appears as pure duty conceals expectations of reward, and moral striving becomes endless and self-deceptive. Morality collapses into hypocrisy.

This contradiction gives rise to the next stage, Conscience, where morality is re-founded on the self-certainty of personal conviction. The subject believes in the truth of its own inner moral judgment, and this leads to a shift from abstract duty to the immediacy of moral action. But without external criteria, this certainty risks becoming arbitrary; any action may now be justified as “moral”, simply because the subject believes it to be so.

This tension deepens and the subject retreats into purity and isolation, culminating in the figure of the Beautiful Soul: a subject who, fearing moral compromise, refuses to act. It fears that acting will taint its inner purity, so it withdraws from the world and clings stubbornly to a self reduced to pure abstraction. In its refusal to engage with imperfection, it paradoxically undermines morality itself, which can only become real through action. Hegel writes that the Beautiful Soul “lacks the force to relinquish itself, that is, lacks the force to make itself into a thing and to suffer the burden of being.”¹²

The Beautiful Soul remains unable to give itself substance, to turn thought into being or commit itself decisively, and the empty object it produces leaves it acutely aware of its own hollowness. In the end, its “burning embers gradually die out,” and “the beautiful soul vanishes like a shapeless vapor dissolving into thin air.”¹³

As Donald Verene notes, the Beautiful Soul retreats into inwardness, seeking inner illumination over public action. It withdraws from politics, science, and social life, reducing philosophy to solitary revelations devoid of dialogue, irony, or eros.¹⁴ It becomes harmless, ineffectual, and purely self-referential, unintelligible/unchallenging to the practical world. It is very sensitive and profound, waiting for a moment of pure authenticity and understanding. This is the melancholy of the Beautiful Soul. Verene emphasizes how this figure has no sense of humor: “The bacchanalian revel of the forms of the Phenomenology is closed to the philosophy of the beautiful soul because such a soul has not and cannot have a sense of humor. Irony, through which appearances are laid open, is not a meaningful thought for it … The beautiful soul takes itself seriously, so seriously it has left the world for itself.¹⁵

Hegel contrasts the Beautiful Soul with the Judging Consciousness (the “hard heart”) that condemns others while claiming moral superiority. This conflict results in mutual accusations of hypocrisy and evil, as each side perceives the other as impure. This impasse can only be overcome through confession and forgiveness as a speculative act, leading to the stage of Religion.

Verene stresses that the Beautiful Soul is a dangerous stage, a moral and intellectual posture that pretends to the highest truth but, in fact, represents a degeneration of Spirit. It is self-satisfied and stagnant. It claims a pure inward access to the Absolute, bypassing the messy, imperfect reality of social existence, moral struggle, and communal life. Thus, Verene emphasizes that it presents an obstacle to speculative thought by absolutizing the subject’s pure inwardness and offering a form of withdrawal masquerading as profundity. The inaction of the Beautiful Soul follows from the fact that, as it passes from Reason, it knows infinity is within itself: “Reason has shown it that the infinite is just something to cultivate in itself apart from the finitude, the specific activity, of the world. The beautiful soul as such is a personality type. It is a delicate creature that cannot act but can have strong pronouncements in language about what goes on around it. It will judge events, but only in language. It cannot act.”¹⁶ Thus, the Beautiful Soul is not only a failed ethical figure but a philosophical danger, reducing philosophy to poetic solitude rather than speculative movement.¹⁷ Its philosophy is a private, poetic inwardness/dwelling, cut off from the shared and revelatory movement of Spirit in Hegel’s dialectic. It is essentially anti-communal, anti-speculative, locked in monologue.

Action, Delusion, and Withdrawal

Žižek’s critique of the Beautiful Soul unfolds the relation between action, symbolic failure, and the ethics of reconciliation. Beautiful Soul is a model of moral self-deception: a subject who complains about a corrupt world but fails to see their own role in sustaining it. It views itself as a victim of hostile conditions that hinder the realization of good intentions, but this attitude of complaint helps reproduce the world it condemns. Žižek extends this idea to the political dissident under “real socialism,” whose moral identity depends on the continued existence of the totalitarian enemy.¹⁸ The dissident does not desire change but the enemy’s permanence, as it is an external anchor for their righteousness. Referencing Lacan’s Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”, Žižek says that the Beautiful Soul refuses to see that the world’s disorder is a message directed at it: a return of its own position in inverted form. Even when rejected, this message still reaches its target; the world continues to reflect the subject’s truth.¹⁹ Reconciliation can only occur when the individual recognizes themselves in what they oppose, accepting that the negativity they condemn is inseparable from their own way of being.

In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek links the Beautiful Soul to Hegel’s thesis that Substance is Subject (not a harmonious whole but the movement of failed subjective projections).²⁰ The subject attempts to impose a moral vision on reality, only to see it inverted as crime, failure, or hypocrisy. This shared logic partly explains why Lacan’s “mistake” in condensing the Law of the Heart and Beautiful Soul: in both cases, subjective righteousness registers socially as transgression.²¹ The Hegelian “negation of negation” does not restore identity but insists on the necessity of failure. The subject’s critical rejection is answered by the world’s rejection of its illusion of innocence.²²

Reconciliation, for Žižek, does not mean moral purification of the world but recognition of complicity.²³ The Beautiful Soul must accept that the chaos it observes is part of its own being. Evil does not lie in action but in the moralizing gaze that sees only particularity and pathology. Žižek, citing Hegel’s concept of das Ungeschehenmachen, the retroactive redemption of failure, emphasizes that truth emerges not by erasing failure, but by integrating it retroactively into Spirit’s development: “The sinful act is retroactively liberated, through the truth that it made possible through its very failure. … We do not simply cancel the act; rather, we just cancel out its failure … an inversion that Hegel called ‘the cunning of reason.’”²⁴ So, the Beautiful Soul’s refusal to act or forgive positions it as the obstacle to reconciliation and speculative movement.

Even though the Beautiful Soul appears passive, Žižek argues that this passivity is actively sustained. It derives jouissance from its self-sacrifice and moral purity. The truly ethical gesture is not self-sacrifice, but the renunciation of the identity built through sacrifice.²⁵

Perhaps this logic invites a speculative typology: might the Beautiful Soul be viewed as an actively passive hysteric, whose inaction is a concealed activity, and the Knight of Virtue as a passively active hysteric, whose action remains abstract, futile, and ultimately reinforces the symbolic order it desires to redeem?

Verene’s image of the Knight as a protester who changes causes easily, interested more in protest than principle, would strengthen this comparison. Together, Žižek and Verene suggest that both figures entangle activity with passivity, inverting moral action into performance.

The Comedy of Moral Consciousness

While these Hegelian figures are often treated as moments in a tragic dialectic of subjectivity, Zupančič’s reading of Hegel allows us to see them as comic figures, embodying the internal irony and absurdity of moral consciousness. Adopting Zupančič’s lens, it is possible to see how the Beautiful Soul’s refusal/withdrawal, the Law of the Heart’s overreach and delusions, and the Knight of Virtue’s failed action demonstrate what happens when the subject’s relation to the Symbolic collapses from within.

This comedy is the moment in which the contradiction becomes visible, and certainty reveals itself to be slippery and tricky, as the subject’s own symptom. Zupančič writes that it is no coincidence that “comedy ranks high” in the Phenomenology.²⁶ In fact, comedy emerges at the threshold of Absolute Knowing, within the culmination of Revealed Religion. It is the moment when the subject ceases to seek the Absolute in a beyond and recognizes itself as the bearer of truth through comic reversal rather than tragic alienation. Zupančič writes,

could we not say that the entire movement of the Phenomenology of Spirit is surprisingly akin to the comic movement as described by Hegel: different figures of consciousness which follow one upon the other in this gigantic philosophical theater go, one after another, through a twist in the process by which a concrete universal is being produced and self-consciousness constituted—that is, in which substance becomes a subject.²⁷

 

The comic subject laughs because it knows that the supposed divine Other was always also itself in disguise. Comedy is not just an aesthetic category but a speculative form of truth, the final self-negation of the alienated Spirit before the ultimate reconciliation. Comedy arises through a reflexive act, in which the subject steps back from its predicament with humility and the capacity to forgive. Perhaps, forgiveness is at the core of the comedic/reflexive act.

There is a comic moment in how the Beautiful Soul, with its perfectionist withdrawal and the way it takes itself very seriously, emerges as the inverse of the Knight of Virtue, while the Knight of Virtue is the transitory figure of pure, emptied-out action in the face of the world’s evils. The Law of the Heart has already withdrawn, not like the Beautiful Soul, but in its own fictions/ conspiracies about the world that does not accept its precious gift of the heart. The three figures are comic in their misjudgments, misguided certainties, and tragic attempts to reconcile with the world.

The comic moment of the quixotic Knight of Virtue lies in the formality of its protests, the way it shadowboxes, in its acting within the Symbolic, and in sustaining its illusion of virtue while disavowing complicity. Thus, in the Lacanian and Žižekian formulation, this figure may be viewed as a perverse supplement to the hysteric, as a moral agent whose action (protest) maintains the order it claims to resist, and unwittingly reinforces the structures of evil. In this sense, the Knight of Virtue may also be read as a comedic resolution to the tensions staged by the Law of the Heart and the Beautiful Soul. Unlike the Beautiful Soul (who refuses to act) or the Law of the Heart (who acts from inner madness), the Knight of Virtue acts out morality as a role, an empty, sham protest.

This aligns with Lacanian idea of perversion, a structure in which the subject disavows symbolic castration and finds enjoyment in performing the Law as the agent of the Other’s enjoyment. The Knight rigidly enacts moral law as a personal mission, disavowing its own desire while positioning itself as the agent of a universal good. Like the pervert, the Knight refuses symbolic castration, clinging to moral certainty and denying the contradictions within the social order. It does not act for personal gain but as an instrument of a higher cause, sustaining the Law’s illusion through formal, abstract protest. Its virtue is ultimately a performance/spectacle disconnected from real social reality.

Thus, the Knight demonstrates the comic truth of moral action, where protest becomes a mode of symbolic enjoyment. The condensation of these figures misses this performative excess that distinguishes the Knight from both the Beautiful Soul’s withdrawal and the Law of the Heart’s romantic expressivism. Verene’s description of the Knight as a professional protestor further clarifies this: The Knight does not seek reconciliation or transformation but sustains its identity through perpetual resistance.

Verene’s insight also aligns with Zupančič’s comedic lens: the Knight becomes a figure of moral farce, virtue as a role, a costume, and a perpetual rehearsal rather than conviction. Building on Verene, it may be argued that the Knight is morally mobile, as its cause is contingent, but its structure (action, protest, intervention) is fixed.

Hysteric on Horseback

The Knight of Virtue can be viewed as the hysteric’s double, as it not only speaks truth to the big Other, but attempts to correct it, and becomes entangled in its mechanisms. Following Žižek’s Lacanian reading, unlike the Law of the Heart, the Knight does not foreclose the Symbolic. It does not hallucinate or conspire but acts within the Symbolic. It is not like the withdrawn/melancholic hysteric frustrated with the Other but still believes in its authority. This figure does not merely lament the corruption of the world; it engages it with moral fervor, but in a manner disconnected from ethical substance. His actions remain empty because they are untethered from concrete historical necessity.

This figure illustrates the comedic failure of over-identifying with the universal (a structurally absurd heroic idealism). Including the Knight of Virtue in the analysis of the Hegelian figures of moral consciousness offers a more dialectically complete view of moral subjectivity, where the subject’s insistence on transforming the world from a position of inner certainty, alongside the futility of abstract virtue in a world that no longer demands it, becomes ironic and even absurd.

The Knight projects its private moral certainty onto the world, demanding it conform to its ideal of virtue. In this sense, the Knight is not merely a hysteric or a passive soul avoiding action, but an active agent of moral formalism who refuses to risk the “good” through dialectical engagement and instead imposes it unilaterally. This makes it closer to a perverse figure, as it disregards the mediating structures of the ethical in favor of self-authorized conviction. It is not just inward, like the Beautiful Soul, nor self-legislative, like the Law of the Heart, nor entirely passive or accusatory.

The Knight is a figure of active morality, motivated by abstract universality, yet ultimately and performatively powerless (a structurally comic figure). It neither produces jouissance nor derives pleasure from sacrifice; it fails because it acts out of sync with social reality and not because of narcissistic withdrawal, as in the Beautiful Soul.

This makes the Knight of Virtue a philosophically awkward and structurally transitional moral agent. It faces its comic failure when encountering a world that does not respond. Therefore, it seems like a bridge between tragic moral assertion and hysterical withdrawal.

 

 

Link to Footnotes and Bibliography